I already went through this week and made all my facebook posts private. I know what you're probably thinking: wait, you're still on facebook? And YES, OK, I'm related to like 80 people who are all either Boomers or GenX, so it's my one-stop shopping space for schadenfreude when I see how disappointed all my cousins are in how their children turned out. Hey, I'm not sure Barry Jr. can be "between things right now" when the last two "things" were "life coach with zero clients" and "back in rehab."
I've been very conscious about making my online profile as narrow and translucent as possible, which is a little embarrassing as it's the result of some pretty direct online bullying. Hopefully seeing me fold like a cheap suit will be a little less damning when you realize I (me, specifically) am being targeted by a combination of the richest person who ever was and the current president of the United States.
I'm a little hesitant to get into too much detail about what I do or where I do it* even here, where I've been anonymous for a long time. I'd like to say it was with foresight for this specific reason, but I think by now everyone who's read any of this knows it was primarily so my mom wouldn't have to read me writing the word "fuck" a lot. She got enough of that proofing my book reports.
Am I a federal employee? Very probably, though we'll have to go with "alleged" until we run any of this past my lawyer (I do not have a lawyer). Have I seen the Elon Musk emails about giving us a chance to be "bought out" of our positions? Reader, I have, but so have you if you have an internet connection. And since I stopped self-publishing the print version of this blog, I know that you do if you're reading this. So nothing is proven!
I'd like to say my experience since the emails aligns with some of the stories about backlash out there amongst federal workers, but honestly, if there's one place you would like to go where you never have to hear anyone talk about politics, get you a federal job. In my experience, since elections happen every four years, nobody wants to explicitly out themselves as one side or another if/when the status quo flips a maximum of two cycles out from the current one. It's not so much fear of reprisal than just a sort of professional politeness based on a Golden Rule approach: I won't bitch about your guy this time if you don't bitch about mine next time. This will be the fifth time they changed the picture in the lobby at the building where I work and so far 0% of the near-fistfights I've seen on the job have revolved around electoral politics or policy. They're always about something way more important, like parking.
The watchwords amongst the working corps of federales is about the same as it is about politics in general: keep your head down. You feel exposed and threatened because this is an effort to expose and threaten, so full marks to all involved for responding correctly. The tension is between the steadiness of the work--every single federal worker provides a service in exchange for their compensation, separate from the volatility of a fickle market--and the calculated destabilization, especially coming from people neither elected nor confirmed to run anything in the public sector. The fact that the people implementing the policy (he said, head shaking) seem to be handpicked for their lack of qualification and/or are literal children of course falls under none of the categories of Coincidence, Accident or Mistake. This is diktat, this is fiat; and fiat by meme, where "meme" is a thing designed to be funny by a person who very pointedly has no functioning sense of humor.
So we weather it and wait to see what the next thing is. There are plans in place to come for federal workers, but we have four years of specific prior experience knowing the primary characteristic of the person in charge (you can pick from the two) and the people around him are a) distractibility and b) a deep, core-level incompetence.
There are already reversals and catastrophes in plot developments so predictable, it would be a category error to call them "twists." These are plot-straight-lines, which doesn't sound so bad until you realize the dead-level road ends at the intersection with an asteroid. Which, you know, on balance...
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*professionally speaking, I mean. Perverts.
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